About this object

Polished red granite statue of a striding male. A compromise between Egyptian ideals of statuary and Roman portraiture for the head. Technical and postural details betray the Roman origin of the statue: the higgly polished gloss for an affect similar to that of the Egyptianising statues of the Hadrian period, the thin pillar that runs at the back from the plinth to the shoulders and a less strict frontality than the one found in Egyptian sculpture. There is slight movement of the upper torso and head which is slightly turned to the left. The bald head has a huge indentation at the top of the crown and the face is heavily modelled with two deep horizontal creases on the forehead, and pronounced cartilage at the bridge of the nose, the ears are flat and the mouth is extremely small, the tip of the nose is restored as well as one ear and several patches. The figure is a composite made of three parts, the head however most definitely belonged to the torso. The granite of the legs is of different colour than the rest of the statue and this indicates that they did not originally belong to the body. The man may have been representing a priest but he does not have any other royal insignia other than the kilt.

Bartman views the statue as veristic and typical of the late Ptolemaic and Roman Republican portraiture but she notes that the crudeness is less common in hyper veristic portraits. She also comments that the exaggerated characteristics make the statue more of a caricature of late Egyptian heads, the details are the most striking feature rather than the geometry of the forms. Bartman proposes that the Roman sculptor may have used a similar statue of Ptolemaic date from the Albani collection as his model.

Author: Coltman, ViccyPublisher: Oxford Univeristy PressDate: 2009-08-06Description: A book about classical sculptures in the early modern period, centuries after the decline and fall of Rome, when they began to be excavated, restored, and collected by British visitors in Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Viccy Coltman contrasts the precarious and competitive culture of eighteenth-century collecting, which integrated sculpture into the domestic interior back home in Britain, with the study and publication of individual specimens byclassical archaeologists like Adolf Michaelis a century later. Her study is comprehensively illustrated with over 100 photographs.

Author: Bienkowski, Piotr; Tooley, AngelaPublisher: Her Majesty's Stationery OfficeDate: 1995Description: A 130 page illustrated book that focuses on the Egyptian antiquities in World Museum's collections to provide a colourful introduction to the land and its culture in the Pharaonic period. An appendix explains the history of the collection and includes information about the Lady Lever Art Gallery Egyptian collection, which is also part of National Museums Liverpool.